‘What Happens Next?’: Can Good Stories Help Save the Planet?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: So politically, geopolitically, the Pacific communities, Pacific countries sovereign as they are, when it comes to a crisis, they come together, and they help each other out.

Elissa Waters: But I think the likelihood that we will do nothing is low. And I think that there is... more importantly, there's a lot that can be done.

Gabriel García Ochoa: We are talking to people. We're learning about their experience. We see, for example, the effects that global warming has on their lives. We visit the places that are affected by climate change.

[Music]

Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts what will happen if we don't change and what can we do to create a better future. I'm your host, Dr Susan Carland.

In part one of this series, we explored the critical role of storytelling in communicating climate change impacts and inspiring action using the Indo-Pacific region as our focal point. We discussed how oversimplified narratives about the unique vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities of the region can be harmful and emphasise the need for nuanced storytelling that captures the complexity of climate challenges and the resilience of affected communities. We also examined Australia's role and responsibilities in the region's climate narrative.

This week, we'll keep our focus on the Indo-Pacific, exploring how powerful storytelling could become a game changer in tackling the climate crisis. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Gabriel García Ochoa: Hi, I am Gabriel García Ochoa. I am the director of the Global Immersion Guarantee at Monash University, and the Global Immersion Guarantee is a program that allows students to travel to 10 different locations around the world and understand the human impact on the environment and how we can address that sustainably.

Susan Carland: Last week, Gabe told us about two competing climate change narratives he sees in his work, the moral argument that we must take action because it's the right thing to do, and the financial argument that effective action against climate change will come with a very high economic and social cost. But he says a new story is gaining ground.

Gabriel García Ochoa: But what I see more and more is also the rise of a third narrative, which is how can we look after the world in a sustainable way? How can we keep finances in check sustainably? And there's people, for example, who are... have come up with ways of doing this. There's Kate Raworth, for example, who came up with Doughnut Economics. It's been a very influential book that looks at how we can have a viable economic system that is also sustainable.

Susan Carland: How does that relate to a doughnut?

Gabriel García Ochoa: That's a good question.

[Laughter]

Gabriel García Ochoa: We rarely think about economics in terms of a doughnut... in terms of a doughnut. She talks about there is the... there are two ceilings to this doughnut. The top ceiling is the limit that we have to keep the world sustainable in terms of our natural resources. And the other ceiling is what society needs in order to be okay. Between those two is sustainability. So that's how she poses the idea of the doughnut.

Susan Carland: As you were talking, I'm just like, how about instead of ceiling, we talk about icing and maybe the bit in the middle? Is that the jam or the cream?

Gabriel García Ochoa: I don't know where that came from.

Susan Carland: I haven't had breakfast, so I maybe getting caught in the details –

Gabriel García Ochoa: Yeah, yeah.

Susan Carland: – of the doughnut.

Gabriel García Ochoa: You lost me with that one. [Laughter, music fades in]

Susan Carland: Gabe also told us last week that humans innate the response to stories in a much more emotional way than we do to cold facts and figures. I guess I wonder why do we persist with trying to change people's minds with facts when the evidence across many areas, not just climate change, but a whole host of areas about changing people's minds, keeps coming back to narrative and connection as being the most compelling way to do it. Why can't we let go of that?

Gabriel García Ochoa: Well, I don't think we should let go of facts. I think we need to have facts working alongside narrative in order to make this work. So the most compelling scientists are the ones who are able to tell a story, are the ones who are able to communicate the importance of those facts. But I think, I mean, we are very prone at universities. We tend to go back to the objectivity of facts... the objectivity effect and promote that. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I want to stress that, but I think that working in tandem across disciplines is the best way to do this.

Susan Carland: So maybe what we need is the hero's journey of climate change with some fact in there. So instead of finding the ring or saving the youngest princess, the hero along the way has to uncover the facts. Look under the rock for the latest data on ocean level rise.

Gabriel García Ochoa: I mean, that's not a bad idea. See, the thing is, when we talk about stories, we can talk about fiction or nonfiction, right? Fiction is the lie that tells the truth. So fiction –

Susan Carland: That's a nice line.

Gabriel García Ochoa: – good fiction, what I call good fiction, is stories that are not real, but they tell us about really important elements of reality. They help us understand our reality through metaphors and lies because we are thinking about things that... we're talking about things that haven't actually happened, right? The hero's journey is an excellent example of that. Now, there's another thing. So when we talk about narratives, narratives work with causal thinking, causal reasoning. So, cause and effect, that's how you build the plot. Actors and events. Characters and what they do. It is a lot easier to understand that causal thinking because we do it so often than scientific thinking. We're much more used to dealing with stories because we see them everywhere than scientific thinking. So when we're able to tell story of science, I think that's the best of both worlds.

[Music]

Susan Carland: Christian Jakob, director of the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century, is an old hand at telling the story of science. He has a knack for making complex ideas accessible, and that's vitally important in his work in climate modelling.

These computer simulations provided the foundation for the Paris Agreement and will be key to using the weather as a resource as we transition to renewable energy systems that rely on solar and wind power. For the average person who doesn't know what climate modelling is and how it might differ to, say, the weather prediction for the next two weeks, what is it, and how are they different?

Christian Jakob: Let's start with what it's not. So it's not like a model of a car. It's not something we build, and then you can come, and you can touch it, and we can see the climate in it. That's not what it is.

It's also not like an economic model. Most economic models, they look at data, and they extrapolate the data into the future. And climate models don't do that either, actually. A lot of people think that's what they do, but that's not what they do at all.

So climate models are different in their starting point are simply the laws of physics, things you've learned in high school, conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, which is Newton's second law. And we know these laws of physics very, very well. And they can be applied to a gas, like the atmosphere. They can be applied to a liquid like the ocean, and that's exactly how climate models starts.

So we write down these laws of physics, and they give us what mathematicians call equations. And with these equations, we can, actually in principle, calculate the future directly from the laws of physics. But a few buts along the way. The first thing is we can't do it on a piece of paper. It's too complicated. So we need to do it in a computer. That brings the next part.

To implement these models in a computer is actually very expensive. There's billions and billions of calculations that need to be done. And imagine we just want to... in climate modelling, we want to look ahead for the next 100 years. To do that, we need to include the atmosphere. We need to include the land surface. We need to include vegetation. We need to include the oceans. We need to include sea ice. We need to include ice sheets potentially. So all these different things, they all have their different component models, and it becomes very expensive very quickly.

So to do it, what we do is we divide the Earth in little boxes. And then for each box we calculate the things we are interested in like rainfall, temperature. Now mathematics says make the boxes as small as you can. The smaller the box, the more accurate the forecast will be. And by the way, this is also true for weather forecasts. The principles are very, very similar.

So if we have smaller boxes, great, but smaller boxes means more boxes to divide up the Earth, which means more calculations, which means we need a bigger computer. And so we always have to make this compromise, how big can we make the box with the computers that we have? So climate models run on the biggest computers on Earth called supercomputers. Wow. And so the compromise usually ends up being the boxes have to be bigger than we want them to be.

Susan Carland: Mm-hmm.

Christian Jakob: So, in current climate models, the Earth is sort of a little checkerboard, a little chessboard where each piece is about 100 by 100 kilometres.

Susan Carland: Okay.

Christian Jakob: Right. So sounds good. The trouble is a lot of what happens in the atmosphere, and in the ocean, and on the land happens in things that are much smaller than 100 kilometres.

Think of your favourite thunderstorm. Turns out thunderstorms are super important to climate, especially in tropical regions like the Indo-Pacific and other regions, other tropics. Super important, but they're very small. So once we have a model that has a hundred-kilometre box, no more thunderstorms, so then we have to re-engineer them back in because they're so important. And that's increasing the uncertainty now in our answer because it's no longer based on the first, but they're still based on the physical laws, but we no longer resolve in our little chessboard how a thunderstorm works. And so it's an approximation of how thunderstorms, and there's lots of other things that are like that you just think about the world has lots of things that are smaller than 100 kilometres.

Susan Carland: So then how, given what you said about the compromises you have to make to expand and contract, how confident are you with climate modelling for the next 100 years? What confidence do you have in it?

Christian Jakob: So that really is a really cool question because it depends very much on what you want to look at. So often people are, are your models right or wrong is actually a completely wrong question. The question should be, are your models fit for purpose? Because now we have to think about, well, what's the purpose? Why are we doing it? Why are we running these climate models? And that then sets our level of confidence. So we are very confident in global average numbers, but most of us don't live on global mean temperature events. So last time, you planned a barbecue based on global mean temperature forecast, right. You don't really... Most of us do not really relate to global mean –

Susan Carland: No.

Christian Jakob: – temperature very well, which is, by the way, I think, part of the issue with us realising that we're changing the Earth because, A, slow.

Susan Carland: Yes.

Christian Jakob: And B, it's very visible in global mean temperature that none of us relate to.

Susan Carland: Right. We think about our own local temperature, which fluctuates every day.

Christian Jakob: Exactly.

Susan Carland: And so we have no connection to whatever the global mean temperature is

Christian Jakob: Because in the end, climate change is weather change. It's for you and me. We don't want to know how the climate's changing. We want to know how's the weather where I live going to change. And that's the next challenge I think for climate science. And that's what we need to work on.

Susan Carland: Putting global climate models into perspective by talking about your most recent barbecue is one way to personalise the way we talk about climate change. And the stories that inspire us to action are the ones that we can identify with. In the Indo-Pacific, many countries are trying to communicate their plight in similarly relatable ways. In 2021, for example, Tuvalu's foreign minister recorded a message addressing the UN's climate change Conference, COP26, while standing knee-deep in seawater behind a half-submerged lectern.

Tuvalu Foreign Minister: In Tuvalu, we are living the realities of climate change and sea-level rise as you stand watching me today at COP26. We cannot wait for speeches when the sea is rising around us all the time. Climate mobility must come to the forefront.

Susan Carland: It was a striking image that was shared widely on social media.

Tuvalu Foreign Minister: ... level rise are deadly and existential threat to Tuvalu and low-lying atoll countries. We are sinking, but so is everyone else, and no matter if we feel impacts today –

Susan Carland: Planetary health expert Professor Tony Capon, director of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, says that simple, powerful images like that go a long way supporting climate change storytelling. It's something he thinks about when sharing information about the human health impacts of climate change.

Tony Capon: Those images of inundation in the Pacific, they really do convey a super important message, and we need to be tuning into that.

Susan Carland: Yes, and the urgency.

Tony Capon: Absolutely.

Susan Carland: This isn't a problem for 50 years away.

Tony Capon: I think that's one of the things about climate change, is not that it... often it's quite abstract and people think it's a future problem. One of the things about bringing health into the conversation is it helps us understand that urgency because people's health is already being harmed in those devastating bushfires here in Australia, for example. It also makes it a personal thing rather than an abstract thing because we know people that are being affected. We might be being affected ourselves.

And importantly, bringing health in can also be positive because there are health benefits from the transition to sustainable ways of living. Reducing air pollution from burning coal, for example, if we're using renewables, people in the Latrobe Valley here in Victoria won't be breathing as much air pollution from the coal-fired power stations. If we're walking and cycling and cities, less air pollution, better physical and mental health from that physical activity. If we're eating a plant-rich diet, then less of a footprint on the Earth, better for our own personal health and well-being too. So there is positive things here. It's not all about understanding the harms.

Susan Carland: Yes.

Tony Capon: It's also understanding the benefits of change.

[Music]

Susan Carland: Tony's insights lead us to an important aspect of climate change storytelling that's often overlooked, adaptive capacity.

Elissa Waters: My name is Elissa Waters. I am a lecturer in human geography, and I am a political geographer. I work on climate change adaptation in the Pacific and in Australia. But I think the one that we kind of miss when we are thinking about vulnerability is adaptive capacity. So the extent to which community or a group of people can change in response to those impacts and threats. And so yeah, there's all sorts of elements of adaptive capacity.

So you can think about the ways that communities can respond to extreme events or rebuild after a disaster. And so it's really all of those exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity that you have to look at when you're considering whether a country is in fact vulnerable to climate change. And the thing we miss as kind of academics, and I guess development specialists and things like that, is that adaptive capacity lever is really, really important, and we often underplay it.

Susan Carland: And is it places, islands, countries in the Pacific? Why are they uniquely, or why could they uniquely struggle with the adaptability in a way that maybe a big country like Australia or a European country doesn't? What makes that a harder task for them?

Elissa Waters: Yeah. So often we think it's a harder task for them. So that depends on how you're sort of measuring capacity. So often we equate it with wealth, right. So we think that certain places are able to adapt, or it makes it harder for them if they don't have as much wealth if they're not able to mobilise resources to respond to these changes. We also think about Pacific islands as being uniquely vulnerable because they're remote, and that certainly is the case in some instances.

But actually, kind of remoteness and wealth, it really depends. So if you think about extreme events and disasters, those assumptions around wealth and kind of what we call strong governance systems like... which are really just liberal democratic governance systems, we assume that it's those factors that help Pacific or that help communities adapt. But as we've seen in Australia, the United States, in Europe with recent heat waves and flooding, that kind of excessive wealth and democratic institutions and strong histories of governance haven't necessarily helped us or those countries. So yeah, it really depends on how you see those.

Susan Carland: I always had the naive view that it was just about size.

Elissa Waters: Yes.

Susan Carland: So if you are a smaller island –

Elissa Waters: Yes.

Susan Carland: ... You've only got so many resources to draw on because you don't have a big landmass, which means you're probably relying on similar food sources because it's all in the same sort of climate.

Elissa Waters: Yeah.

Susan Carland: And if this part of your island is destroyed, there's only so many other places you could go. Whereas if you're in a bigger country like Australia, where if this is a problem, we've got other areas that we can try to expand to. But you're saying that's not... that doesn't play that much of a role?

Elissa Waters: I mean, it does in some cases, but there are advantages to being small as well. So if you think about the extent to which you can mobilise your communities, the ways in which they can communicate and share resources. So in the Pacific, you have cultural governance systems where they share resources between large family groups and are able to move kind of resources in the case of extreme events afterwards.

But also, you've got this kind of connection between communities and political systems that's really strong in small places, and governments can be responsive to those needs really kind of quickly. And that's something that large countries really struggle with. We've seen in Australia in the bushfires, the recovery period, and the governance challenges that come from having a big federated country versus some of these smaller countries. So yes, there are definite disadvantages to being small and remote from big markets, and getting resources in and out of remote places is really tricky. But there are advantages too, and I think we really need to look to those advantages in order to then build up those place-based capacities –

Susan Carland: Yep, that makes sense.

Elissa Waters: ... for how we deal with that.

[Music]

Susan Carland: It's crucial to understand the local context that affect different communities, adaptive capacity. Misunderstanding or disregarding the nuances of specific communities, culture and environment can lead to saviourism, well-intentioned but misguided efforts that are actually more harmful than helpful. The most effective programs communicating climate change-related challenges and addressing its consequences are the ones rooted in local knowledge and needs.

Tony Capon: One of the projects that we are leading from here at Monash is called RISE, Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments. So we are working in slum settlements, in Makassar in Indonesia, and in Suva in Fiji. We're working with those local communities to bring nature-based solutions in the slum settlement to protect health from disease and to prevent flooding in those communities in the context of extreme events, and improve the living conditions of people in the slums with practical engineering modifications that make ecological sense.

It's a really important initiative that is, if you like, in between what we call WASH, which is requiring and encouraging people to wash their hands and do all the personal hygiene and the major trunk infrastructure that we see in cities like Melbourne, which is not always practical across the region. So what are the practical, low-cost, nature-based solutions? And this is really an important example of the kind of practical interventions that we can see.

Susan Carland: And what are some of those practical low-cost environment or nature-based solutions that you've come up with in collaboration with the local communities and how are they different between the two communities? Because I imagine maybe what works in Fiji is not what's appropriate in Makassar, for example.

Tony Capon: That's right. Absolutely, context is really relevant, and the Pacific context is quite different to the Indonesian context, but there are things that we do in both places. For example, using reed beds in informal settlements to help improve the water quality in the settlements.

Practical housing interventions as well. Insulating homes better because often, in slums, there's no insulation at all. It might just be a tin roof. And by insulating, we both reduce the cost of any heating that people might be using, but we also protect health from both hot weather and cold weather. And so there's many practical things that we can do... be doing better in the broader context of health and wellbeing.

Susan Carland: Are there any suggestions that the communities that you've worked with have given you that maybe you or your team wouldn't have come up with yourselves, and when they suggested you think, “Ah, that's interesting. We wouldn't have thought of that,” and you've tried it and it's worked?

Tony Capon: These are very much collaborations. It's co-creation, a co-design process and very much benefiting from indigenous and local knowledge, which is often overlooked in the kind of research we do in modern universities. There's often a sense that modern science is superior as a way of understanding how we should respond to these challenges to indigenous and traditional ways of doing things. And that's evidently not the case.

I mean, we know from those bushfires in Australia that cultural burning, Indigenous cultural burning is a different way of managing our land and can reduce the intensity of fires. You have smaller fires rather than one really, really big one. Traditional housing across the region, lots of diversity, and traditional housing but usually adapted to the cultural and the local geographic context. We don't need cookie-cutter housing that comes designed in a high-income country and imposed –

Susan Carland: Right.

Tony Capon: ... on a local context.

Susan Carland: You're not taking a McMansion from Australia and putting it in the villages in Fiji.

Tony Capon: That's right. Absolutely.

[Music]

Susan Carland: Dr Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a Samoan journalist and journalism scholar who's reported from the front lines of the climate crisis in the Pacific islands for more than two decades. She says that through centuries or more of observation, experimentation and understanding, indigenous cultures offer insights and innovations that can provide some of the most effective natural climate adaptation strategies.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: A very good example of this is a taro, which is a root crop that a lot of Pacific islands depend on as a staple, like bananas or potatoes. So the taro crop is integral to many Pacific communities, and in islands like Tuvalu and Kiribati, they have come up with a way to continue growing the taro in areas that are inundated by salt water. And this is by creating ways to grow the taro in flotation devices, or rather create flotation, natural flotation elements to grow the taro. And in Vanuatu, they've explored scientifically what the most drought-resistant or flood-resistant taro variations there are, and that's shared across the Pacific.

So those are just examples of how communities are already adapting to the climate crisis. But I cannot emphasise enough the value of chiefly knowledge and traditional knowledge that already exist in Pacific communities. Some of these include medicinal knowledge and healing practises, which now have a scientific basis, but have always been here.

Susan Carland: Gabe and his Deputy Director, Dr Sarah Gosper, lead another unique program that makes a point of centring the stories of change-makers on the front lines of climate change across the globe.

Gabriel García Ochoa: The Global Immersion Guarantee, affectionately called GIG, is a program unique to Monash University where students can go to one of 10 different locations across the world and learn about sustainable development. And one of the... We call it a guarantee. It's not a scholarship or a grant because every student who's eligible for the program gets a place in it, and it's funded, which is very exciting. We are, as far as I know... If there's a fact-checker out there, please correct me, but as far as I know, we're the biggest student mobility program in the world.

Susan Carland: So how... you say however many students are eligible can go, how many students are eligible? How many do you send?

Gabriel García Ochoa: Well, last year we sent just under 1,200 students. This year, we had 3,083 applications. I think we're going to be sending around 2,200 students this year. It's growing exponentially.

Susan Carland: Well, I don't know if you know, but I saw the excitement on Reddit when, the day the portal opened, people were frantically typing in the Monash Reddit thread to talk about, “Have you gone in? What did you put? Oh my gosh, is the site going to crash?”

Gabriel García Ochoa: I think we had 280 applications in the first 10 seconds.

Susan Carland: Okay. Well, that's good. I mean, who doesn't want a, I was going to say, a free trip, but of course it's not free. The students are studying and working and doing their things.

Gabriel García Ochoa: Yeah, that's right.

Susan Carland: So how then do you bring narratives into the student's GIG experience when they are learning about and working in these communities and learning about sustainable development?

Gabriel García Ochoa: Yeah, that's a great question. I think what the program has done, what GIG has done, is co-create a platform for local experts to tell their stories and for students to learn with them. And I say co-create I think that's important because everything we do is in collaboration with our local partners. So maybe a cheesy way of thinking about it is a bonfire, a campfire, and the program has lit the fire and people are gathering around that to hear those stories.

And in Fiji, for example, we work with the Uto ni Yalo, who have been reviving traditional skills of sailing and marrying them with what are the contemporary needs of people who sail around Fiji. So, for example, they have this beautiful, beautiful boat that has solar cells and is solar-powered, but it's built with traditional Indigenous knowledge, and they do a lot of work in teaching people about this and passing this knowledge on. So that's a beautiful example of traditional knowledge being used in the Pacific.

So our students learn from local experts, and they hear their stories, and we actually, we don't have lectures in GIG. We call them local inside sessions, and the students get to learn from people in government in the private sector in NGOs, and they tell their stories. I mean, that's kind of what happens.

Susan Carland: Right. So the students are directly learning through the narratives.

Gabriel García Ochoa: Yes. Narrative plays a really, really important part.

Susan Carland: Do you ever get a sense that the narratives the students are telling themselves or each other is starting to change?

Gabriel García Ochoa: I think that the way they relate to narratives is starting to change. And what do I mean by that? Students often don't know what to believe and what not to believe, so I think universities play a very important role in discussing that and developing critical thinking. But also, I think even those stories that we know are factual, that are real, we're desensitised to them now because of this prevalence of stories all the time everywhere.

What the Global Immersion Guarantee does for this experiential immersive learning is that those stories come to life again. It's not just something mediated by your phone. It's not just something on TV. We are talking to people we are seeing their... we're learning about their experience. We see, for example, the effects that global warming has on their lives. We visit the places that are affected by climate change. When we go to Italy, for example, there's a field trip to Venice, and if you go to Piazza San Marco to St. Mark's Square, the Adriatic Sea is right there, the lagoon, the Venetian Lagoon is right next to it. If the sea level rises, St. Mark's disappears, and we understand the cultural impact that that has.

The same if we go to the Pacific. If we go to Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa, there are places that are both of natural heritage and cultural heritage places that are very important to local indigenous peoples that carry that same importance that for many of us, for example, St. Mark's Square would carry and if the sea goes up, the sea level goes up, that disappears. It is very different when you can smell the salt, when you can touch the ocean, when you can see the beauty of these places, and speak to someone who has a deep traditional connection to those locations.

So that brings the stories to a whole different level. We don't illustrate our stories in GIG with PowerPoint presentations with slides. We don't have augmented reality. We have reality. What better way to illustrate a story than through reality?

Susan Carland: Which is when you think about it's quite counter-cultural because what you are doing, which really doesn't happen much anymore, are unmediated stories. They are stories that are not going through a media, social media, mainstream media. The stories being told by a person –

Gabriel García Ochoa: That's right.

Susan Carland: ... tight in front of you.

Gabriel García Ochoa: And there is a hunger for that, Susan. There is a hunger for that human connection because we don't see that often, and students respond very, very positively to that. They get it because that's organic learning, that's learning with all your senses. You get to touch, you get to feel, you get to smell, you get to listen. Everything is involved, and it's just a different way of doing it.

Susan Carland: Do you think the way GIG operates with having people in front of them, unmediated narratives, do you think it changes the way students understand reality?

Gabriel García Ochoa: One-hundred per cent. I think it does because there is a visceral, organic element to sharing a space with someone, breaking bread with them, seeing that they are not a snippet. They are a full, complex, rounded human being with a story, a belonging, dreams and aspirations, and we don't get that through mediated stories. We just... I just don't think we do, particularly with the prevalence and the number of stories we have access to, but we don't have access to those unmediated stories and the organic, visceral response that they evoke in us because, again, that's what we, humans are hardwired to do, respond to those stories.

I think that this kind of unmediated learning, which is not uncurated learning because we do a lot of work to create the programs, and there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes, but it is unmediated in the sense that students get to learn firsthand from experts who have lived experience about these challenges and that changes them. That is really transformative. I know it's a word that gets thrown a lot, transformative. But I've seen it in the course of two weeks our students grow not just academically, they grow as people. When you have a student who sometimes may not have left Victoria, and they go from Melbourne to Mumbai, their head just explodes.

Susan Carland: What role do you think programs like GIG have in improving or addressing some of the climate concern that we see, particularly in the Indo-Pacific?

Gabriel García Ochoa: I think racing awareness is very important, so that's one of the key elements of the program. But I also think that one of the other things we focus on is understanding that we're going to learn from local experts about what they're doing. We're not going to resolve their problems, and that's really important because the last thing we want is to spare any saviour complex. That's not what we're doing. This is about learning from others and assuming our own responsibility when it comes to these challenges.

Susan Carland: University students aren't the only ones with a lot to learn from the communities at the coalface of climate change. Here's Lagi again. What do you think other nations can learn from the way Pacific islands are managing climate change?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Other nations can certainly learn from the resilience, but also the way that when it comes to crisis, to a crisis, to the climate crisis, we naturally band together. So politically geopolitically, the Pacific communities, Pacific countries, sovereign as they are, when it comes to a crisis, they come together and they help each other out.

This is replicated also at the national level and at the village level. If all the houses are wiped out in a village, they build a house together, they all occupy that house together. In the cyclones that I have lived through, we all go to the strongest house in the village when the cyclone hits so that we all can survive. So what perhaps the international community can learn is that that spirit of solidarity that is naturally and built into the Pacific community is really something that the global North can learn from the Pacific.

Susan Carland: That spirit of solidarity helps Pacific island governments take chances, says Elissa, and it's why they're world leaders in climate change adaptation strategies.

Elissa Waters: Countries in the Pacific are really leading the way in terms of initiatives for adaptation, in part because they have to. Susan Carland: Yeah. Elissa Waters: They're on the frontiers of climate change. There's a lot going on when we think about local initiatives to climate change, so things like hydroponic programs to increase food security and really practical things like community gardens that are allowing communities to decrease their reliance on imported food and things like that.

But we've also seen people are getting very excited about nature-based solutions, which things like mangrove systems to reduce the impact of storm surges, but also bioengineered seawalls to be able to deal with the challenges that are coming with sea level rise. And the Pacific is... Well, Pacific islands are really interesting places. They're open to experimentation with these kinds of things, which I think we struggle with here.

Susan Carland: Why do you think that is?

Elissa Waters: Partly it has to do with willingness... the willingness of governments to experiment and things like that. For a long time, we thought that we had a mandate problem when it came to adaptation across Australia and the West. And I think actually we... governments are a bit behind on that and that what we need is much more willingness to experiment when it comes to adaptation solutions. And so yeah, the Pacific are doing quite a lot of that. We often think about future scenarios for the Pacific as if adaptation is not going to happen. So we sort of take that adaptive element out of the picture, and so things look very bleak when all you're considering is exposure and sensitivity to those kind of increased threats.

But if we are able to fund, which is the real key issue, adaptation projects, and programs at local and regional levels, then that picture could change quite dramatically. If we do nothing, it's looking existentially difficult for those countries, but I think the likelihood that we will do nothing is low, and I think that there is... more importantly, there's a lot that can be done. There's money to do that, and so the challenge there is finding ways to bring that money down from the international level to fund adaptation programs in countries and in place.

Susan Carland: How do we convince the average Australian that it's worth Australia investing that money in protecting islands in the Pacific when they might go, “We need that money here for our own things.” What's the advantage to Australia?

Elissa Waters: Yeah, the advantage to Australia, I think, I mean, it's the old kind of arguments about aid, right. So having a stable region being able to encourage development in our region is always of benefit to us as a... in our kind of diplomatic efforts. But I think it's more than that. I think also we need to see that these initiatives can work, and we need to be able to be part of that as a regional community.

And as I said, we have a responsibility as a large global emitter and the largest in our region. We do have a responsibility to aid Pacific islands in their adaptation. So I think partly it's about working with those governments, but also we have a lot to learn. We are behind in our own efforts to be planning for climate change and adaptation, and yeah, there's a lot to learn from these governments, peoples, and communities that are essentially ahead of us in this process.

Susan Carland: What are you seeing in your research that is giving you hope in this area? Initiatives that are making positive change for the communities that you work with?

Elissa Waters: Yeah, I mean, lots of things, and I think that we need to pay attention to all of the kind of great initiatives and work that's going on. We've focused on barriers for a really long time. What stops us from being able to achieve climate change adaptation? I think we need to shift into thinking about what enables climate change adaptation, how do we kind of move forward in that space.

Susan Carland: Programs such as RISE and GIG are paving the way for a new narrative about Indo-Pacific communities. These initiatives, rooted in traditional knowledge and focus on adaptation and resilience, are changing how we approach climate challenges and how we share climate-related stories. Hopefully, they represent a shift towards more empowering and locally driven narratives about the region. Here's Lagi.

What are your hopes for the future for Pacific island communities in the face of ongoing climate change?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: As a journalist, I would like to see more empowering coverage of the way that Pacific islanders are seeking solutions are amplifying climate solutions from the local level to the international level. As a journalist, I think there's so much room to really explore how Pacific island journalists tell the stories of Pacific islanders in our local languages, in our communities.

Understanding the nuances of the way that climate change really impacts our communities, our cultures, and identities of Pacific islanders. That's my hope for the future in terms of journalism and how it's covered. As a Pacific islander, as a Chieftess in my family, I only hope that our cultures can continue to thrive and sustain itself throughout the threats to the natural spaces that sustain these cultures and that holds our ancestral knowledge together.

[Music]

Susan Carland: Lagi, thank you so much for joining us today. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Thank you so much for having me. Fa'afetai lava. Susan Carland: Thank you to all our guests on this series, Professor Christian Jakob, Professor Tony Capon, Dr Gabriel García Ochoa, Dr Elissa Waters and Dr Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson. You can find links to their works in our show notes.

We'll also link to more information about the extraordinary RISE and Global Immersion Guarantee programs that Tony and Gabe discussed in today's episode. For more information about the future of the Indo-Pacific as it battles climate change straight from the researchers and leaders on the front lines, visit Monash Lens at lens.monash.edu.

Thanks for joining us, and see you next week with an all-new topic.